A Vegetarian World Order, Gay Accents & Why Girls Wear Pink

Esquire's Answer Fella believes that there are no stupid questions, just stupid people who don't ask questions, fearing they'll look stupid. So ask Answer Fella anything. If he doesn't know the answer, he'll find out who does or who has a guess that sounds right.

Because it matches their pudenda. Sure, AF often kids -- because, goddammit, AF loves -- but that's no joke. As Dr. Gregory S. Berns, a neuroscientist at Emory University, speculates, "Women think that men are attracted to pink, and men are indeed, for a very simple reason: fertility. If you think about it from an evolutionary perspective, and if you look at most of the animal world, females indicate their readiness to mate with red and pink. Biologically, that's the color of engorged tissue; first it gets pink, then it gets red."

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And then, of course, Mrs. Fella gets yet another headache. But AF digresses, partly to avoid the muck of nature versus nurture, pinkwise. Girls -- baby girls -- wear pink because pink became the color that denotes "girl" in our own society (and only fairly recently; early last century, blue was a conventional color for girls, pink for boys). Now, says Lyn Mikel Brown, a developmental psychologist at Colby College, "they're sort of pinkified. Girls come to associate girlhood with wearing pink."

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Which returns us to engorged tissue. "For thousands of years," Margaret Livingstone, a Harvard neurobiologist, tells AF, "women have been painting their lips red. They do this because men find red lips attractive. Why? Because sexual arousal makes your lips look pinker. When you have increased blood flow, you have increased sexual arousal -- and then pink clothing accentuates that."

And then, of course, AF trots downstairs to fetch the Tylenol.

What would happen if everyone became a vegetarian?

Answers vary. If you're Janet M. Riley, senior vice-president of the American Meat Institute, the impact would utterly devastate our nation. "The meat and poultry industries together employ 500,000 Americans, not to mention all of the people raising livestock and growing livestock feed," she tells AF. "So you can't even begin to estimate what this would take out of the economy. Not just sales of meat -- unemployment costs would skyrocket."

But if you're Bruce Friedrich, vice-president of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), a vegetarian world would be virtually indistinguishable from heaven: "We would have more than enough resources to feed the world. We would free up potable water, allow topsoil to regenerate, slow global warming, stop polluting our waters, and perhaps turn back the tide on the environmental apocalypse that many key scientists are predicting."

Wait, wait -- there's more! "A completely vegetarian world would see great changes in all manner of micro- and macroviolence," adds Friedrich, "including war. Think about it: Would a world that wouldn't harm a chicken be one that could or would wage war?"

Could and would, says Dennis T. Avery, director of the Center for Global Food Issues and senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. "There has never in history been a voluntarily vegetarian society," he says. "In the past, when people have been unable to get high-quality protein any other way, they sacrificed [humans] at altars. I'm suggesting there's a real danger of cannibalism, rather than vegetarianism, if it's a vegan society. If we have a vegetarian society -- if eating milk and eggs is okay -- then we'll have a huge increase in the consumption of milk and eggs. There will be no significant change, really, in the captivity -- as PETA would term it -- of chickens and cattle. The hogs would disappear."

The hogs would disappear? That may just be the saddest sentence ever spoken. PETA bastards.

Is there a gay accent? Some of my gay male friends -- even though they come from different regions of the country -- have a discernible lisp and nasal twang, and they enunciate every word very clearly, with a slight lilt in the middle or end. Any explanation for this?

His research is controversial, but according to J. Michael Bailey, a psychology professor at Northwestern University and the coauthor of a 2004 study on the subject, the answer is yes. "Not all gay men have the gay accent," he says. "But a whole lot of them do, probably more than half. We've demonstrated without a shadow of a doubt that people can tell a gay speaker from a straight speaker much better than chance."

As to why gay men sound so faaabulous, there are two main hypotheses: "Some people think that it is an affectation, a cultural-specific way of speaking that people learn once they come out into the gay community; they kind of unintentionally copy one another. I don't believe that is what's going on, but I can't prove it yet," cautions Bailey. "The other is that it's acquired much earlier, and it might have something to do with feminine speech. A lot of gay men are feminine, and there's reason to think that early on they might be imitating women and girls in various ways, and the style of speech might be one of them."